ETC Venues

Conference centre WiFi Fault Find, Redesign & Implementation

The Client

Award winning Etc.venues are one of the UK’s leading independent providers of dedicated meeting, training and conference space, they host over 77,000 delegates a year across 16 venues in London, Manchester and Birmingham.

Etc.venues have recently opened their largest venue offering 65,000sqft over two floors in the iconic County Hall building overlooking the Thames.

Issues/Challenge

Etc.venues initially engaged Performance Networks to conduct a wireless site survey covering their Marble Arch venue. Where users were beginning to report experiencing drop outs across the WiFi network using a variety of devices across all three floors of the venue.

As exceptional user experience is of the upmost importance to Ect.venues they immediately enlisted WiFi specialist Performance Networks to investigate and provide a remedy.

WiFi Survey

Performance Networks started to investigate the reported issues by performing a full WiFi site survey using Ekahau Site survey/Spectrum Analysis along with Wireshark captures.

This provided the client with a full report detailing the current network configuration and performance along with the effects both the physical and RF environment were having. The WiFi survey used the building floor plans to create highly accurate graphical visualisations of the current network and any issues, including coverage heat maps, data rates, channel bandwidth and channel overlap.

Analysis and solution

Performance Networks engineers then analysed the data from the WiFi survey to provide a list of specific recommendations to remedy the issues and further optimise the WiFi networks performance.

The WiFi equipment in use was high quality enterprise grade and significant investment in a solid network infrastructure had been made by the client, however environmental factors, configuration and access point placement were affecting the wireless network.

Following the reports findings, Performance Networks were engaged by the client to carry out their recommendations, these started with re-positioning the access points to their optimal locations. Then working with the client to make changes to the WiFi network configuration on their WiFi controller to optimise the network and counter high RF interference from neighbouring buildings, a growing problem for many businesses in densely populated city locations.

Once all changes had been made a secondary survey was carried out to validate the changes and fully document the performance of the optimised network.